You can open John Cage’s A Year from Monday anywhere and find a snippet that will turn your head around. Like this clarifying view of TASTE, and the opinions about style that are so much a part of modern life:
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A Performance Coach’s Questions to Ask in the New Year
Kate Conklin coaches performers, athletes and thinkers to help them work better and excel. In this TEDx talk, she describes her unexpected path from studying traditional Bulgarian singing to investigating big questions about the creative life. They are well worth asking in the New Year.
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Lego’s Questionable Values Denies Ai Weiwei Art Materials
(Video link here.) We just heard the astonishing news that Lego, a company whose product we have featured numerous times as a symbol of possibility, has refused to fill a large order of its plastic bricks — an art material — for Chinese artist’s Ai Weiwei upcoming exhibition at in Australia. Their reason: They don’t provide bricks…
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Toolkit: Questions to Ask Before Giving Up
We were stunned by Everything Is Awful and I’m Not Okay: questions to ask before giving up, published on Eponis last March. The sixteen questions are SPOT ON for the drawing awareness to the kinds of everyday log-jams we all get into. It is an instant, brilliant perspective-shifter that makes us wonder “Who is this wise…
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Reflecting on Difficulty: 5 Questions that Transform
At the height of a recent crisis a few months ago, our friend Chris Eldredge send me this note: I’ve been reading Jack Kornfield’s “A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life” and saw this. I thought it might interest you. ( I changed a bit of the wording where…
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5+ Happiness Generating Questions
As ever, Neil Gaiman nails it. But there’s a question in his wonderful words, one that many people we know have been asking themselves: What Do You Have that Nobody Else Has? What is the particular flavor/quality/aspect/talent/vision unique to you? And even more importantly, what are ways it can thrive in the world? Ko Im over at…
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Werner Herzog’s Brilliant + Questionable Advice
We are always interested to read advice of creative, original thinkers AND to see what of their wisdom we DON’T buy. We’ve learned the hard way that one size does not fit all. If we are going to forge our unique path, we’d do well to try out what we’re not sure of, embrace what works or rings…
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Neil Young’s Anthem for Climate Change + A Question
To coincide with Sunday’s massive world-wide Climate Change March, Neil Young wrote an anthem and has made it free to stream. Whose gonna stand up? Another essential question. You can listen here or stream it at Soundcloud. Thanks Holton!
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Climate Change’s Essential Questions: Why Not?
We LOVE these essential Improvised Life-esque questions inspired by the worldwide People’s Climate March.
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Wine Wise Guy Anthony Giglio Answers Your Questions About Wine
EVERYONE we know has questions about wine and the best person we know for answers is Anthony Giglio, aka The Wine Wise Guy, an Improvised Life contributor and of late, wine blogger for Details. Here’s some essential advice.
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Question of the Day (Every Day)
Where are we going? via Fowler Museum at UCLA with thank to who ever sent it our way Update: A VERY astute reader wrote to tell us it was Proust. Even better!
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Design Question: When to Leave Rough and Aged As Is
Part of the artfulness of envisioning a space is knowing when to keep rough and aged areas and let them be themselves, a subject we’ve written about before. Here, patched brick walls painted white, and a rough concrete floor are a lovely backdrop of elemental REAL that works well for modern furniture. After demolishing of…
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the question to ask when you make a mistake
This cartoon was the subject of the New Yorker’s great cartoon caption contest, where readers are invited to submit their caption for the cartoonists drawing. Our favorite caption (that didn’t win) was: Mistakes were made. We make so many mistakes daily that it was heartening to see this image of Noah’s miscalculation. Although we don’t…
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strangely chic water crate garbage can + the garbage bag question
Recently, quite out-of-the-blue, we contrived a surprisingly chic garbage can. In the course of moving apartments, we had found 6-gallon bottle of “emergency” water stowed away in the back of a closet. It was housed in a rectangular black plastic crate . When we pulled the bottle out, the box suddenly looked wonderfully Bauhausian, a perfectly-designed…
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to do or not to do, that is the question
Yesterday afternoon, I looked at the massive to-do list that would keep me working into the evening and…actually for days – an impossible amount of tasks from writing posts to the endless details of moving to tending an elderly mom’s affairs. I wondered if there was another way to be handling things that allowed for…
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david allen’s potent questions for a new year
We’re not very big on New Year’s resolutions. We’ve always felt like “resolving” to accomplish big fat goals for the year sets us up for failure, and ignores life’s complexities—oftentimes, a single resolution is actually made up of a lot of different pieces. It’s juggling all of those pieces that makes keeping resolutions so difficult.…
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the car mirror ‘blind spot’ and other myths worth questioning
Ever since we learned to drive, we wondered why sideview mirrors couldn’t be adjusted to avoid the blind spot that causes so many accidents, and kept us awkwardly looking over our shoulder to see if any cars were hiding in it. We never actually tried seeing if we could adjust the mirror, testing out possible…
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a question-driven, learning-centered life
Cara De Silva alerted us to this compelling piece by David Brooks in the New York times. It’s a short profile about Philip Leakey, son of famed anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey. We love the description of where he lives (though couldn’t find a photo of the “mountaintop tent”), his numerous projects, many of them…
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laurie anderson’s big question
We stumbled on this lovely 3 minutes with Laurie Anderson, and found it calmed us and made us THINK. (We also loved seeing her cooled out, very real space). It was made by Dropping Knowledge.org, a website that “invites you to question yourself and the world around you. Every time you ask yourself a question,…
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11 questions to ask before buying something
On BoingBoing recently, Mark Frauenfelder wrote a terrific overview of Cheap:The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel, who asks “What are we really buying when we insist on getting stuff as cheaply as possible?” The answers are a revelation and worth reading; they range from low-quality food supply and deserted town centers to…
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